From the TI-99 Italian User Club.
From Apex Trading (and the proprietor, Vince Apps) we have seen the games
Devil’s Island (open world that started with a real-time puzzle using a turn-based puzzle),
Forbidden City (lots of red herring objects, a “force field” puzzle at the end),
and Pharoah’s Curse (deathtrap heavy, “ON SHALL GO” riddle)
with the latter two also being printed in “source code books” by the author.
A later printing, again from the TI-99 Italian User Club.
Haunted House is much different than these three, and it is tempting to say it must be by a different author, but I’m still putting the probability at higher than 70% this is another work by Apps. Adventures were just one of the styles that Apps wrote in, since his books weren’t just adventure games, but a whole menagerie of genres. I’d call this one on the near-adventure / near-strategy end similar to Hunt the Wumpus and Treasure Hunt; the tape this game originally came on has Haunted House on one side and Wumpus on the other.
This game also falls in the roguelike-adventure bin I’ve been placing works that are heavy enough on randomization that, conceptually, the player ought to be playing a “new adventure” on each restart. This was sometimes quite explicitly the authorial goal, like with Madness and the Minotaur. We’ve had games on the edge, like The Queen of Phobos, which has items scattered in random places and four enemies which move at random, but that game still can have a traditional “walkthrough”; a true roguelike-adventure would have a hint guide that reads like with a strategy game, which gives general guidance but can’t anticipate fully what the player is seeing.
The map, the objects, the puzzle placement, and the puzzle solutions all potentially have randomness applied. With Mines by James L. Dean, puzzles had fixed solutions, but everything was otherwise mixed up. Madness and the Minotaur had a fixed map but had everything else (including some but not all puzzle solutions) get jumbled.
Haunted House has
a.) a fixed map
b.) with an object in every room, and random placement
c.) where some of the objects solve puzzles, and the correspondence between object and solution is fixed
d.) but where the puzzles themselves are placed randomly.
The only moves are N, S, E, W, T (take) and O (open). This isn’t that unusual for this style of game; Mines had similar restrictions as did 6 Keys of Tangrin (despite Haunted House not having the random map, 6 Keys feels the closest in gameplay to everything I’ve tried).
Every room has a “container” although containers can vary all the way from an outhouse to a desk. For some of the containers, the player needs to be holding a particular item to open them; the outhouse might be locked and need a key. However, these conditions are jumbled along with the objects, so an outhouse might be open in one run, locked needing a key in another, and stuck needing a hacksaw in yet another.
You have an inventory limit of 3. The goal is to escape with as much treasure as possible, so I suppose a “win” would find three treasure items of high value.
The coins and gold bar would count. Other items you might randomly find are a dead rat and some dust, which I reckon gives less points.
Moving from one room to another takes 2 minutes. The game starts at 11:30 PM and everything is “safe” until midnight. Once midnight hits, the player has a random chance of running into an enemy.
The player might escape (but have their items stolen) or they might just die.
My very first run I got two treasures (see the coins and gold bar earlier) but I had gone east from the start, which you’ll notice from the map is a one-way-path. The only way to get back and escape is from the west side of the house, so I died before making it there.
6 Keys had the same large number of containers and same level of inventory restriction, but in that game there was absolutely no reason to suspect key #2 would be more valuable than key #3; it was always simply a crapshoot. This game is a little better: the small map means you are more likely to run across a puzzle before its solution, and there’s some objects whose physical nature (like an old top) are clearly unlikely to be used in a puzzle. You can perhaps do a risk/reward balance between carrying just items-that-seem-like-they-solve things like a screwdriver, and items that seem like they have value for escape.
In other words, it is possible to try to devise a strategy on the fly. The big issue is that the turn limit is incredibly tight; at 2 minutes per turn starting at 30 minutes before midnight, you technically have 15 moves only that are “safe”. This is not enough to be thorough and after that point you just need to get lucky.
I made it out with a score of 3400 with a “safe route”. In each place I opened the container (this doesn’t use up time) but only picked up items that seemed useful, eventually making it to two treasures in my inventory and just guessing what I should be holding.
tomb: spider
outhouse: cup
chest: can of oil*
coffin: hacksaw*
filing cabinet: mouse
sideboard: hammer*
basket: glass eye
conservatory: gold bar (leave behind oil)
back of house: banknotes (leave behind hammer)
garden shed: key (leave behind hacksaw)
back of house
west of house: top
coach house: layer of dust
west of house
south of house
OUT
The can of oil, hacksaw, hammer, and key are all potentially tools. One of the game’s issues is if you do actually need a key or whatnot, while it will tell you when you don’t have the item, if you’re actually using it no message is given. It is possible one or more of the items I found in the route above required something I was holding, but I don’t know for sure. I also am unclear if there’s lower or upper limits to how often an object is used; I played a game where the key was used twice, but might it be that the key is used zero times on a particular generated map?
The route I used for a “hard exit at midnight” run. You need to go to the east side of the house first since the only way to end is via the west side of the house.
I did a slightly riskier run where I added a visit to the kitchen, but otherwise used the same route. (In the oven I found a mouldy loaf, which makes me wonder if some rooms are more liable to have certain random objects — that does change the calculus of all this, but I didn’t find the experience compelling enough to work out how this might change percentages.)
hammer*
top
banknotes*
can of oil*
gold bar* (leave can)
dead rat
cobweb
mouldy loaf
hacksaw* (leave hammer)
(step)
(step)
(step)
spider
glass eye
mouse
(step)
cup
need screwdriver
(step)
(step)
“Need screwdriver” was with the coach house. You could try, at this point, to adapt and see if you can make a run into the house to search for the screwdriver. If you do this, you should try to swap your items you are holding for the useless ones (that is, trade the mouse for a gold bar, and the banknotes for a spider) so that if the kind of supernatural enemy comes that only steals your items, you can get your treasures back while on the return route.
I tried to do a “flexible” run where I ran through every room if I was denied opening a container I would go back once I found the item to do the opening, but this ends up being too far past midnight: either I would have my tool stolen or I would die.
If you’re writing a strategy game, one of the best things to do in order to test it is to simply write a guide to your own game. If it involves interesting choices and dynamic responses to the environment, it’s better than one where the best approach is to simply follow a script. Based on my multiple attempts at Haunted House, I think the best approach is to follow a script.
After making it out with two treasures which is easily doable with the minimal script, the only level after is finding three (out of diamond necklace, banknotes, gold bar, coins); that seems to be heavily dependent on luck and the slight bit of strategy I just mentioned (keeping treasure from getting stolen) only serves to protect one’s current score. Since the only reason you’d be backtracking in the first place is you found the tool you need, you can’t really do anything to mitigate the effect of spirits stealing your stuff; either you are holding the tool on the way to a treasure location (and if it gets stolen, it is gone forever) or you are holding the treasure you obtained by using the tool.
From one of my runs. I tried to backtrack after getting the hammer but it was stolen.
So while this is essentially a strategy game rather than adventure (which is interesting in a conceptual sense, at least) the actual gameplay fails at the strategy level. The player’s restrictions are too tight and options too low to really have good choices vs. bad choices rather than lucky choices vs. unlucky ones.
Let’s get back to a real adventure next time, shall we? With a good parser, even! I have a whole week booked out and might be willing to extend to two if the game’s difficult enough.
Renga in Blue 